The Past, Present & Future of Oral Cancer Therapies

The landscape of oral cancer therapy hadn’t seen many significant changes until recently. Refinements in radiation, chemotherapy, and surgical procedures have provided incremental improvements over the last several decades, but it was the approval of targeted and immunotherapies around the turn of the century that has promised to revolutionize how we treat oral cancers. But have these new technologies lived up to that promise so far? And what can we expect going forward? In this lecture, we will review the history of oral cancer treatments and look ahead to the promises and potential pitfalls of future therapies.